Understanding Stress: Its Impact on Health and Disease

One cannot really understand a disease in vacuum, but rather only in the context of another person suffering from that disease.

Thanks to the revolutionary advance in our medicine, and public health, our patterns of diseases have changed, we are now living well and long enough to slowly fall apart.

There is now an extraordinary amount of physiological, biological and molecular information available on how all sorts of intangibles can affect our body events.

These intangibles include :

Emotional Turmoil
Psychological characteristics
Our position in society
How society treats people in that position.

They can affect medical issues such as :

Cholesterol in blood
Fat cells stop listening to insulin and plunge us into diabetes.
If neurons in our brain will survive 5 mins of stroke

We humans live well enough, long enough and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events in our heads.

Homeostasis : Level of oxygen, acidity, temperature is maintained by the body. Our body loves homeostasis.

Stressor : Anything from the outside world that knocks you out of homeostasis. Also can be anticipation of that happening. We can turn on stress responses by thinking.

Allostasis is about the brain coordinating the body wise change, often including changes in behavior.

For vertebrates, the core of the stress response is built around the fact that your muscles are going to work like crazy.

One of the hallmarks of stress response is the rapid mobilization of energy from the storage sites to muscles and the inhibition of further storage. Heart rate and breathing increases to transport energy at a higher rate.

During stress, growth and repair tissue is curtailed, sexual drive decreased in both the sexes, females are less likely to ovulate or carry on pregnancy to term, while male begin to have trouble with erections and secrete less testosterone. The immune system is also affected as without stress it is ideal for spotting tumor cells that will kill you in a year. Pain is blunted in stressful conditions like in a war. And finally our senses become sharper

Walter Cannon – Fight or Flight Theory

Three staged Stress Response

Stage 1 : Alarm. Stress is noted and identified
Stage 2 : Adaption/Resistance
Stage 3 : Exhaustion(Prolonged Stress) where stress related disease emerges.

With sufficient activation, stress response can become more dangerous than the stressor itself.

If you constantly mobilize energy at the cost of energy storage, you will never store surplus energy. You will fatigue more rapidly and your risk of diabetes will increase.

Stress Dwarfism in teenagers
In females, the menstrual cycle may become irregular or cease at all.

In both sexes, interest in sexual behavior decreases.

Two elephants on a see saw model of stress related diseases explains that it is easy to balance a seesaw with 2 kids on but balancing with 2 elephants on is really hard like if no stressor is present it easier to maintain homeostasis but presence of prolonged stressor makes it hard for our body to maintain homeostasis :

Diverting energy from long term building processes
Your massive levels of various stress hormones can make a mess if something else ub the stress related process.
Can result in hormonal imbalance.

Addison’s Disease : People suffering from it when in a major stress situation like an accident fall into the “Addison” crisis. BP drops and they go into stress. is a rare long-term endocrine disorder characterized by inadequate production of the steroid hormones cortisol and aldosterone by the two outer layers of the cells of the adrenal glands (adrenal cortex), causing adrenal insufficiency. Symptoms generally come on slowly and insidiously and may include abdominal pain and gastrointestinal abnormalities, weakness, and weight loss. Darkening of the skin in certain areas may also occur. Under certain circumstances, an adrenal crisis may occur with low blood pressure, vomiting, lower back pain, and loss of consciousness. Mood changes may also occur. Rapid onset of symptoms indicates acute adrenal failure which is a serious and emergent condition. An adrenal crisis can be triggered by stress, such as from an injury, surgery, or infection.

Shy Dragon Syndrome : Mere standing up causes all sorts of unpleasantness. Shy Drager Syndrome (SDS) is a movement disorder which is often referred to as a parkinson plus syndrome or Multiple System Atrophy (MSA). For patients afflicted with this condition, rigidity and bradykinesia are the primary extrapyramidal symptoms which are present. The “plus” refers to autonomic nervous system dysfunction which leads to much of the disability seen in this disorder. Syncope, urinary incontinence, impotence, constipation, fecal incontinence, cardiac arrhythmias as well as other symptoms occur as a result of widespread pathological changes in multiple areas of the central and autonomic nervous system.

Source : Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/327.Why_Zebras_Don_t_Get_Ulcers